Covered #8: Marianne Faithfull – As Tears Go By
This series is not just about featuring hits and evergreens, that wouldn't be enough. It aims to present songs that have succeeded not only in their original version but also in many other renditions. A lot of covers are described as "better than the original" and in many cases, only a few people know the original. Sometimes there is even a dispute as to which version came first. The songs we are going to talk about and, more importantly, whose cover versions we are going to present, won't be based on the place or time of their creation, and definitely not on their original musical genre. Folk, jazz, blues, rock, pop or musical, we can find interesting songs anywhere.
A casual listener might think there is a mistake in the title, knowing that "As Tears Go By" is a famous song by The Rolling Stones, sung by Marianne Faithfull. But that's not quite right. The story is much more intricate and Marianne plays a more central role in it than we might have expected. That's also why we won't explore beyond the narrowly defined creative territory this time – there's plenty to listen to anyway.
"As Tears Go By" is one of the first songs written by the Mick Jagger – Keith Richards duo. Their then-manager Andrew Loog Oldham is credited as a third co-writer, and that's only because the "Glimmer Twins" named the original version, supposedly created in Oldham's kitchen, "As Time Goes By" – which was, of course, the title of the famous song from the movie Casablanca (who knows if Mick and Keith really didn't know or didn't care), so the manager stepped in, changed a word and co-signed the song. Given its subsequent success and the royalties that followed, he certainly didn't go wrong.
At the beginning of 1964, when the song was written, The Rolling Stones were all about their beloved cover versions of classic blues songs. Neither they nor their fans were ready for ballads, so the song was assigned to Marianne Faithfull, a then seventeen-year-old new discovery on the English scene. She sang "As Tears Go By" as a light semi-ballad, featuring Jimmy Page, who accompanied her incognito as a studio twelve-string guitarist.
Interestingly, to this day it is still not 100% clear whether Jagger and Richards originally wrote the song for The Rolling Stones or directly for Marianne Faithfull, that's where their statements differ (not from each other, they just say something different each time). One thing is certain: in December 1965, the Stones released their own version, which soon became as big a hit as Marianne Faithfull's version.
The lyrics of "As Tears Go By" may not be exactly high poetry, but they appear to be quite an authentic lyrical record of ... an ageing man's thoughts. Where did the 20-year-old Jagger get that idea? And what was going through the mind of this 17-year-old teenage girl who was rising to the position of London's sex symbol when she sang these words?
One thing is certain. After many years when Marianne Faithfull would often find herself leaning over a cliff from which there would be no return, after all the great and casual loves, including the one for her hit songwriter Mick Jagger, with whom she formed the exemplary celebrity couple of the wild late sixties, simply after working her way out of all the mess, she recorded her best album, 1987's Strange Weather, produced by the incredibly sensitive and visionary Hal Willner. On that album, she recorded a new version of "As Tears Go By", accompanied, among others, by Bill Frisell's dreamy guitar.
This album opened the second – and absolutely crucial – part of Marianne Faithfull's career. She recorded monothematic albums of songs by Angelo Badalamenti and Kurt Weill, while Nick Cave, members of Pink Floyd, Beck, Mark Lanegan, Billy Corgan and Dave Stewart composed for her. She also worked with great producers like Warren Ellis on her penultimate album Negative Capability. And it was on this record, in 2018, that she looked around in tears through her "flagship song" for the (so far?) last time.
While The Rolling Stones played "As Tears Go By" live for the very first time (not counting the live broadcast of The Ed Sullivan Show in 1966) on A Bigger Bang Tour in 2005, Marianne Faithfull rarely skipped one of her biggest hits during her concerts.
And since it is customary in this series to finish with a bit of bizarre fun, even this time we won't let the honoured reader walk away empty-handed. Yes, in their early days, The Rolling Stones tried to speak to their audiences across the globe in their native tongue. Fortunately, they got tired of it pretty soon...
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